First of all, I don’t want you to help me with a specific problem. All the details in this post are just examples and I’m interested in getting a general understanding.

So I just wanted to play doom eternal, but when I press play on steam, after a couple of seconds the button switches from blue back to green with no game running. I checked protondb and saw that the game was gold rated, so it should run fine.

I checked the tweaks that people use and they suggest different proton versions. But no matter what I do, I basically get nothing. There are no error messages or log files. Same with other games I tried in the past.

So basically when a game does not work out of the box, I have no idea where to look for cues on how to fix it. Is there a verbose mode or something similar?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    Steam does spit out some diagnostic messages, and I believe – don’t quote me on this – that programs that it runs normally have the same stderr/stdio, so stuff they write will show up there as well. Normally, these are not saved in a file. I generally launch it from a script, so that it’ll save said log messages in a file that I can view.

    gam-steam.sh:

    #!/bin/bash

# Some games (Wasteland 2) require more file descriptors
ulimit -S -n 4096

exec steam "$@" >~/.steamlog -console -nobigpicture -nochatui -nofriendsui -silent 2>&1 &

    Leaves log messages in .steamlog in my home directory. You may or may not want some of those other options being passed to Steam.